Russian Thistle = Tumbleweed

I am a certifiable NPR junkie.  This afternoon as I drove towards home, I was listening to Science Friday on my local NPR station (to which I contribute $5 per month), and they were talking about invasive species.  I LOVE this topic, as one of my good friends in grad school did her thesis on the Chinese mitten crab.  I named one of our cats Mittens, in honor of this incredible crustacean.  My favorite mitten crab story that she shared with me was about some folks trying to smuggle a few mitten crabs into the US on a commercial air flight.  The crabs got out of the cooler under the seat, and started traveling up and down the aisles of the airplane, terrorizing the passengers and flight attendants.

borrowed from http://www.rimeis.org/species/images/es2.jpg

But I digress, as usual............

I know that invasive species are generally bad, but I have eaten so many blackberries on the Burke-Gilman trail between my apartment in Fremont and the University of Washington campus, that I have a little sliver of doubt about the "invasive" adjective put in front of many species.

One of the callers into the Science Friday live broadcast explained that the tumbleweed plants that you see in so many movies (and that I have dodged when driving across the desert in between AZ and CA) are actually an "introduced" species from Eurasia called Russian Thistle.

They "tumble" as a way to distribute their seeds in the surrounding area.

Hmmmm........

Fish Flies are fanatical about JAZZ!!!!

[fish fly photo borrowed from http://karendecoster.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/3671610359_de632c84dd.jpg]

Another interesting critter I have learned about since moving to Michigan about a year ago is the fellow pictured above, who is called a fish fly or may fly.  They normally come out in the spring, but since we had such a wretched cold spring, I think their hatch happened later than normal this year.  

I took my smooch to a very cool Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) event out at the Eleanor and Edsel Ford House this weekend, just a few miles from our house on Lake Saint Clair.  The DSO was on strike most of the time since we moved here, so this was the first time we had seen them in concert.  I chose the Louis Armstrong Tribute they were doing last weekend with following fireworks.

We were chilling on the grass listening to the great music, but as the sun went down the may flies started swarming around the lights.  The vocalists were obviously consuming the rather large critters as they tried to perform, because I heard a few chokes during one of the numbers.  They turned all the lights off up on the stage, and then the guest musicians were having some trouble reading the music.  They soldiered through it all, and made a few jokes, but I was glad I wasn't getting bombarded by the little chitinous creatures.

As we walked back to the parking lot, you could see thousands of may flies congregated around each light post.  Luckily the lights were about 25 feet off the ground, so we were not impacted.  The prius was not so lucky on the drive home.  Every time we got close to a street light, we smacked into several dozen of the critters that were way down at street level.  You could hear them crash into the wind shield.

The next morning there were horse flies all over the car eating the remains of the may flies.  Circle of life, I guess.......